The University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance announces that Alexis Riley will join the Department of Theatre & Drama as an assistant professor this fall. Riley is a performance artist, scholar, and educator whose research focuses on disability performance in the 20th and 21st centuries. She most recently held a President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Michigan.
“I am beyond thrilled to join SMTD. As a national leader in the arts, SMTD and the Department of Theatre & Drama are invested in growing disability arts at U-M and beyond,” said Riley. “How can we approach disability not only as an invitation to develop more inclusive practices but also as an opportunity to deepen our artistry? SMTD, with its world-class faculty, enthusiastic students, and top-notch facilities is uniquely positioned to explore this question. I am eager to collaborate with colleagues and students already at work on this and similar initiatives for many years to come.”
Riley specializes in theatre, dance, and performance studies, disability studies, and mad studies—a field of scholarship focused on the experience of mental illness—with particular interests in practice-based research methods and accessible pedagogy. Her current book project, Mad Moves: Embodiment, Survivor Memory, Curative Performance, explores how performances created by people held at Oregon State Hospital from 1947 to the present memorialize institutionalized people across time. This research has earned numerous national awards, including generous grants from the American Theatre and Drama Society and the Charlotte W. Newcombe Foundation. Her most recent publications appear in Theatre Topics, IRQR, and Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies, with forthcoming essays in Theatre History Studies and Performance Matters.
In addition to producing conventional scholarship, Riley also directs The Mad Memory Project, a multi-year performance series crafted in community with fellow disabled artists. She has presented these performances at numerous venues in the United States and abroad, including the Cohen New Works Festival (Austin), the Center for Mad Culture/Press Here Gallery (Chicago), and Performance Studies International (London).
These projects inform her approach to teaching, which centers accessibility as a strategy for fostering inclusion in and beyond the theatre classroom.
“Dr. Riley impressed me with the ways that she frames her scholarship in disability studies in relation to the professional goals of theatre students,” said Tiffany Trent, chair and associate professor of the Department of Theatre & Drama. “She articulates how the values and ethics of disability and performance invite detailed attention to stakes and storytelling in ways that can make us all better artists. For me, her work nuances how to intervene and ease at the same time. Her research and practices commit to expanding participation in art and society, and to witness how she weaves her work is a true pleasure that will benefit our students in the department, throughout the school, and across the wider campus.”
Riley received a BA from Rollins College, an MA from Bowling Green State University, and a PhD from the University of Texas.